by Freya North
Chloë’s bottom is numb, her neck is stiffening and she is feeling tired. Finn stares intently across the sea at Scotland with an ambiguous half-smile that is semi-sad. Chloë claps her hands lightly on her thighs.
‘Oh well,’ she says in a jolly voice, ‘I’d better wend my way!’
‘Easy how you go, now,’ says Finn, without diverting his gaze.
‘It’s been lovely to talk to you,’ Chloë says warmly, crouching and extending her hand. He drags himself away from whatever is obsessing him and cups his hands around hers.
‘Pleasure was mine!’ He winks at her, gravely. Chloë makes a careful path back to the barrier alone.
‘Make your peace, Cadwallydy,’ she hears Finn call after her, ‘make your peace.’
When she has reached the safety of the path, she turns and waves. There is no longer anyone there to wave back.
She drives home with a trepidation which ensures that she motors at thirty miles an hour. Frequently, she stops to admire the view and take deep breaths. Up and over a steep hill, the road bisects a small lake. Really it is smaller than a pond, but it is a very deep navy and the wind breaks little crested waves upon it, which gives it the grandeur of a lake. There are Highland cattle grazing nearby.
‘All is pointing to Scotland,’ says Chloë, taking note of her worried, tired eyes in the rear-view mirror.
She is very near Ballygorm now but takes a minor road that will lead her back via three sides of a square. Dry-stone walls plot and piece the meagre fields of the wiry high ground; the rocks used in their construction are round and perched on top of each other in an apparently flimsy configuration. With the sky clearly visible through the spaces in between, the walls stretch across the land like lattice-work and seem most inappropriate for their purpose. It is a strange contradiction for, though they look weak, Chloë knows that she can push her weight against them and they will stay put. She stops the Land Rover and walks over to a section of wall and stares very hard at it; that she now shares its juxtaposition of fragility and strength does not escape her and she thinks on it awhile. She sits on her heels with her back resting lightly against the wall. A scrabble of sheep edge nearer and hear what she has to say.
‘I’ve made myself plain. Said what I feel. Expressed my indignation. And yet, though I do feel cleansed in some way, I feel sad too. Remorseful, a little.’ The sheep chew their cuds thoughtfully and Chloë mulls over her thoughts, running her fingers through the grass and pressing her back more firmly against the wall.
‘Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. Taken it on the nose. Cried later.’
She wouldn’t mind crying now, but she thinks better of it.
‘Perhaps it’s better – healthier – to feel sad rather than resentful.’
The sheep amble away. They seem to have faith in her. She’s on the right track. So she drives on. She has not been along this road before. As it dips down towards the valley the stone walls are replaced by a hotchpotch of barbed wire fences and thorn hedges; a more vicious way of dividing a much gentler landscape. Just before she comes back on the main road, she passes a rusting grain silo in a field. It is redundant, battered and lying on its side. Graffitied.
‘Good luck Trevor + Julie’ it proclaims on its nozzle.
‘Loop loop, go home’ it reads in large white letters daubed along the side. Fleetingly, Chloë wonders what or who ‘Loop loop’ is, but the message strikes a graver chord.
‘If someone told me to “go home”,’ she says aloud, ‘where would that be? Where would I go?’
TWENTY-SEVEN
Chloë crept to her room. A tray had been laid with orange juice, sandwiches and biscuits. A small vase proffered a bunch of lilacs from the garden and propped against it was an envelope marked ‘Scotland’. As she ate, she turned the envelope this way and that, holding it to the light, fingering the sealed edge. But she did not open it, nor did she give it to the Andrews for safe keeping. She did not even take it to her nose for a just-in-case. Instead, she popped it into her empty rucksack and went to bed. It was half-past eight but she did not want to have a bath or to think about anything. Sleep rescued her for a full twelve hours.
For the next few days, Finn’s words, ‘Make your peace’, resounded in her mind on waking and on retiring. And yet the atmosphere was decidedly amicable so she saw no reason to undermine it by soliloquy or confrontation. Gus still found it difficult to infuse his requests with niceties, but his tone ensured that they were no longer demands or orders. Their contretemps thus went unmentioned, but the fact that Chloë now worked hard quite willingly, and that Gus neither barked at her nor criticized her, proved that all that had been said had been absorbed and reviewed.
She rarely saw Ronan; just from the window or across the other side of the lawn. He and Gus had chosen the site for Her while she had been at the Giant’s Causeway and she was grateful that she could see it neither from the study nor from her bedroom. However, try as she did, with eyes closed or wide open, Chloë could not actually remember what the sculpture looked like. Or what it was specifically that she so loathed.
With a week to go, Chloë found she became restless and her sleep was fitful. Suddenly she was not so eager to embark for Scotland and yet she was primed to leave Ireland. She was tempted to call Skirrid End, to request a fortnight’s respite, but she knew there was neither room nor reason for detours. Jocelyn knew what she was doing. Peregrine and Jasper had assured her of this, without actually shedding the light Chloë had requested on Gus.
It was Ronan’s last day but he declined supper at the house. Chloë pretended she was utterly engrossed in her typing when he visited the study to make his farewells. She tapped whichever keys her fingers could travel to most swiftly while Gus thanked Ronan heartily and praised him to the hilt.
‘Chloë, Ronan’s going tomorrow. He’s here to say goodbye – too busy packing his things to eat with us tonight!’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Chloë in a vague voice while adding a flurry of dollar signs, asterisks and sixes to the typing, ‘bye then,’ she called and turned her head towards Ronan but kept her eyes on the screen while her fingers worked furiously, ‘best of luck!’
Something woke Chloë late that night. It was not a sound from outside but one from within.
‘Shut up, Finn!’ she grumbled, sandwiching her head between two pillows and begging sleep to envelop her again. It was no good. She was wide awake and lay in the dark for a while. Soon she realized it was not all that dark, for a full moon pressed a silver wave between the curtains and into the room. She observed the shadows for a moment and then went over to the window. It was a most beautiful night, with stars strewn liberally and the moon throwing platinum glints and glances over the trees and sculptures. Antony Gormley’s bronze figure seemed to call to her and, though she felt momentarily daft, she raised her hand and waved to it.
Without considering her motive, she dressed herself, and crept downstairs and straight out into the night. She walked directly to the Gormley and put her hand on its arm, looking intensely at the face. Its eyes, despite their veneer of bronze, seemed to stare straight ahead. Chloë followed their gaze and alighted on the five urns. She touched the cheek of the statue and left for the pots. As she hummed softly into each, she detected that their echo seemed to come from the right. She turned in that direction and saw Her lying tranquil in the dip of the lawn that led to the pond. The moonlight blessed the limestone with a softness that defied its true fabric, and the stark blue-blackness under daylight was now washed a silken silvery grey.
The urns had stopped humming. There was not a sound.
Slowly, Chloë padded over to the sculpture and walked around it in her own time. She circled it four times and, on the fifth, ventured her hand out to its surface. That it was faintly warm surprised her. And yet it was a different sculpture from that which had so shocked and insulted her a week before.
It is me. I am Her. And that’s not a bad thing to be.
‘No one will kno
w it’s you,’ called Ronan softly across the night. He strolled over to her from the urns. He was wearing jeans and a polo-neck and looked taller, lankier than in his boiler suit. Chloë turned towards him but did not speak. He approached without looking at her and ran his hands over the limestone.
‘Funny how it is never cold,’ he said.
‘I thought the very same,’ she answered quietly, with a meek and fleeting smile. They observed the stone together in a heavy silence. Ronan travelled his hands over the sculpture, letting them flow and slip into the dips and over the curves. Chloë realized she was holding her breath. There was something on the tip of her tongue but pride and embarrassment prevented its expression.
‘A synthesis of Woman,’ murmured Ronan, ‘but no one will know that it’s actually you, Chloë. Only you do. And I, of course!’
Though Chloë nodded, she was still a little uneasy. The work was neither crude nor shocking. Nor was it insulting, not really. Just blatant. Raw. Naked versus nude. Rather flattering, actually. The sculptor’s muse – oh! how it was she who had tormented him. In carving her out of his system, he had immortalized her too. Set in stone and caught in time.
‘It was a shock,’ said Chloë flatly. ‘I’d have appreciated a warning.’ (‘Chloë duck,’ said Mrs Andrews later, ‘surely that is why a muse is a muse – the artist is slave to her spell, whether or not she is aware of casting it. He cannot but press and mould and devote his art in and around her. Because of her.’ Chloë thanked her effusively and gazed, rather proudly, at her own reflection awhile.)
‘No one will know it is you,’ Ronan reiterated. ‘Some folk say that the secret is in the stone,’ he continued much more warmly, ‘but I like to think that the stone’s secret is the prerogative of the sculptor.’
‘I know,’ started Chloë in a smaller voice before trailing off. ‘I didn’t mean to insult you. Well, yes I did, I suppose. But I wouldn’t want to now. It’s not half bad. It’s me – this Her – after all.’
‘I should have warned you,’ Ronan conceded, ‘but I want you to know that, er, when we – I mean, what happened – well, I had no ulterior motive. But afterwards, the passage of the piece suddenly became so clear. You were my inspiration. This is one of my best works and so I thank you, heartily.’
Chloë wondered whether her blush was discernible under moonlight. She stood close to Her and laid her arm gently along it.
‘Well,’ she said after some time, ‘I’m flattered then. So I must thank you, Ronan Brady.’ They met each other’s eyes and shook hands across Her, formally and firmly.
‘Goodbye, then,’ smiled Chloë, ‘and the best of luck. Really. I’m glad that I’ve known you. A sculptor. And a very good one at that!’
Ronan lifted his head in recognition and acceptance.
‘Bye,’ said Chloë, taking her hand from his and raising it in a small wave.
‘Fare ye well,’ said Ronan once she was out of sight, ‘Chloë Cadwallader.’
‘Ahafta go nye,’ choked Mary, dabbing her eyes and gulping, ‘you take care of yous, ya hear me?’
‘Of course I will,’ said Chloë warmly, putting her hands on Mary’s shoulders and coming close. They embraced.
‘Thanks, comrade mine!’ whispered Chloë.
‘Wheeker of a gal,’ sobbed Mary into her neck, ‘wheeker of a gal.’
‘I thought we could visit the shores of Neagh,’ said Gus behind the wheel of his Jaguar while looking intently at the road ahead.
‘Lovely!’ said Chloë, gazing out of the window, eager to commit to memory the very hue of this verdant land.
‘Mary packed a light picnic.’
‘How nice,’ said Chloë.
‘Great that you can fly to Glasgow from Belfast,’ remarked Gus.
‘Most convenient,’ agreed Chloë, ‘my sea legs are dreadful.’
‘So were Jocelyn’s,’ said Gus very quietly. Chloë rested her head against the window and decided not to comment.
Chloë had thought how Northern Ireland’s great lake appeared disproportionate to its land mass on the map, but standing there on its shores she was content that it should be so. With the shore across the lough so distant, and no land visible either side of the water, Chloë could quite believe that it was a sea. Certainly the waves and busy ripples under the strong breeze compounded this impression, along with the pervading wafts of coconut from the gorse. The section of shore that Gus had taken her to was utterly unspoilt and they had strolled down fields to reach it. They walked along a small breakwater of great boulders smudged with rounds of lichen as yellow as egg yolk, to a small bench set conveniently and most picturesquely at the end.
Mary had packed hard-boiled eggs with the shells dented for ease of peeling, paste sandwiches, rock cakes, and apple juice decanted into a large jar. Chloë and Gus passed the food and drink between them affably.
‘I’ve never had Mary’s rock cakes before,’ said Chloë, though their taste was certainly familiar.
‘That’s because she doesn’t care for them herself,’ explained Gus. ‘I asked her to make them for me, according to a recipe I have.’ He trailed off. ‘I even make them myself sometimes, but unfortunately work dictated that I remain in the study and away from the kitchen yesterday.’
Chloë smiled and was about to ask polite questions concerning Gus’s culinary hobby, when he started to speak again.
‘We’ve not eaten paste sandwiches either, have we?’
Chloë thought the remark odd but she agreed that, indeed, they had not.
‘You see, Chloë,’ Gus said mistily, ‘this picnic is a precise replica of the best meal of my life.’ She was too baffled to respond but there was no need as Gus continued.
‘I partook of it right here, where we sit today. But almost forty years ago. The view has changed little, Chloë – and apple juice from a jar still tastes just as it did then. That day was the best and worst of my life.’
Chloë put the rock cake in her lap. To hear Gus speak so freely demanded her unadulterated attention.
‘When this picnic was packed the first time, Chloë, it was not Mary who prepared it,’ he said, his eyes flitting across her face, ‘but Jocelyn.’
You must be her great love! The one Gin alluded to!
Chloë ate no more and, automatically, she pushed herself closer to Gus.
O Jocelyn Jo, that’s why I’m here!
As Gus spoke he looked at his lap mainly, sometimes out over the water, very occasionally to Chloë, scouring her face before darting his gaze away. Chloë learnt of a Jocelyn who had harvested elderberries into her skirt for Gus to make a cordial. She heard of a Jocelyn who had danced barefoot at the Giant’s Causeway. She was told of her godmother’s penchant for skimming pebbles into the sea at Ballygally. How she could envisage Jocelyn and Gus so clearly, wrapped around each other on the great sofa, reciting poetry, reading passages of Joyce, sharing silence. Being in love.
Chloë concentrated hard on Gus’s words, soaking up a part of Jocelyn’s life about which she had previously no inkling. He spoke of their courtship, of her rock cake recipe, that he still had the apron she wore, that it still hung on the hook in the larder and that Mary was not to touch it.
‘And me?’ Chloë enquired.
‘You?’
‘Did she – what did she say about me? How much did you know? Then, and before I came.’
‘She said you were a “petal”. She loved you intensely.’
‘But why, Gus?’
‘Why what, Chloë?’
‘Why didn’t I know of all this?’
He did not respond.
‘Why didn’t you say?’
Still he remained silent.
‘Sooner?’
He looked away.
‘And, most of all,’ she asked forlornly, ‘why did it not happen? You and Jocelyn?’
Gus sighed, picking the sultanas from the rock cake and flicking them into the water.
‘I loved Jocelyn with every ounce of me,’ he said
quietly, ‘but I knew she had loved and lost and would never tread the path again.’
You weren’t Him?
All was as clear and yet as indistinct as the waters of Lough Neagh. At once, Gus’s behaviour was justified and forgiven for it was dictated by pain rooted in goodness. Chloë allowed her heart to ache alongside his on the shores of Neagh and they shared silent thoughts of Jocelyn. When Gus raised his wrist to check the time, he found Chloë’s hand tucked warmly round it. With his other hand, he held hers in place, just slipped it along his arm a little so he could see his watch.
‘Well,’ he exclaimed bravely, with a tender tap on her knee, ‘we should make a move, I think.’
They packed away the remnants of the picnic and cast the crumbs of the rock cake on to the water. For the birds, you know, the fish.
‘What an amazing place,’ said Chloë, ‘it’s so vast!’
‘Do you not know the story of the lough?’ asked Gus.
‘Is there one?’ responded Chloë.
‘Is there one!’ he exclaimed. ‘My dear, how do you think the Isle of Man came to be?’
‘Sorry?’ Chloë twitched her eyebrows and smiled back at Gus.
‘Finn McCool, of course,’ he said quite conclusively.
‘Finn?’ Chloë exclaimed. ‘What’s he got to do with it?’
‘Well, soon after he built his causeway, he scooped up a handful of land and hurled it into the sea. The land became the Isle of Man; the space it left filled with water and became Lough Neagh.’
‘Finn,’ stammered Chloë, ‘McCool?’ She frowned, trying to make sense of the nonsensical.
‘Aye!’ assured Gus. ‘He was the giant. As legend has it. So people say.’
From the aeroplane window, Chloë is afforded a bird’s-eye view of Lough Neagh. It proves to her that it is indeed landlocked. As if a great clod has been plucked away from the land. A few minutes later and she is looking down on the Isle of Man. It matters to her not in the slightest that its circumference bears little similarity to the lough’s. She thinks to herself how deceptive appearances can be; how the smallest of men can be giants, that beauty often lies beneath that too hastily denounced as ugly.